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Re: Cell cup color

I've bought smoke, blue, amber, green.... I primarily use the smoke, as list above. It's translucent enough that you can see the royal jelly, and I like the contrast between the larva on the color of the bottom of the cup.

Re: Cell cup color

I like using a mixture of colors, on each cell bar. I also enjoy looking at bright colors, in patterns. I assemble my cell bars, with repeating patterns of two or three colors, on each bar. It just looks nice, to me, and is easier to remember, which cell I last deposited a larva in, when I'm grafting.

Re: Cell cup color

Definitely the darkest color (smoke) is the easiest. Grafting into the yellow and red is harder than smoke. I utilize the different colors as a way to keep track of the donor mothers. I'll sometimes have grafts from three mother queens in one cell builder and use the cell cup colors to keep track.

Re: Cell cup color

We use whatever is abundant and cheap. To color code particular breeders we mark the cups with a paint pen after candling. If you have a lot of breeders you are grafting from, sometimes it takes a two-color color code for a particular breeder. This makes it easy to see trends in the mating nucs.

Re: Cell cup color

I like the dark colored JZBZ cups, ie smoke, blue and green, for the ease of seeing the larve and royal jelly. I also like to use wax cups that I make, cheaper and I know where the wax came from. I have used wax cups from Rossmans which I also liked.

I find that the amber cups are hardest to see the larve. I use multiple colors when grafting from multiple breeders, a different colored cup for each breeder. Allows me to graft a small number of cells from a number of different breeders and use 1 cell builder and not get confused as to which cell came from which mother.